Blockchain

Creating Transparency and Efficiency

Blockchain - The Future of Music

The emerging technology of Blockchain represents the most exciting opportunity for music in decades​ since the beginning of Napster. It promises to bring transparency, more direct artist to fan engagement​ and ways for DJ’s and music artists to have more global reach​

Blockchain provides the mechanism to cut out the middlemen who removal value from music artists, enabling a fairer distribution of rewards to music creators

It represents a secure mechanism to record and administer copyright assets and attribution in a friction-less and efficient mechanism, enabling real time receipts of royalties

Blockchain creates an efficient direct musician to fan engagement mechanism which allows for the generation of new business models

Smart Contracts

The Use of Smart contracts to solve licensing issues and catalog songs with their respective creators

Evidence of Copyright Ownership

Registering their works to a blockchain, the rights holders can ultimately end up with concrete evidence of ownership, which is free from tampering

Fast, Frictionless Micropayments

Royalty payments, for both the sound recording and the underlying words and music, are often slow, taking months or even years. Cryptocurrencies can allow for micropayments to music artists in the form of ‘tips’ or streamed music

What Blockchain Means for Musicians

New Forms of Revenue to Supplement Music Income

Access to capital for artists attempting to operate without a record label remains limited. This is in part because of the difficulty of understanding a clear pathway to profitability for some artists and a lack of understanding of the process of generating new revenue streams and/or a lack of time

Blockchain will have a significant effect on crowdfunding, with artists issuing their own shares or tokens and smart contracts guaranteeing that pledge contributions would be returned were funding targets not met

Transparency through the Music Value Chain

Due to the lack of an industry-wide system for tying usage to ownership and details of many streaming deals are hidden behind non-disclosure agreements, it is difficult for artists and managers to assess whether labels, publishers or collection organisations are processing payments correctly

Blockchain can achieve consensus without, crucially, requiring a central trusted authority or intermediary to verify the transaction. This will radically transform a culture of ‘black boxes’ and non-disclosure agreements

Networked Database

Currently there is no single database that documents ownership of all song and recording copyrights. Instead, there are a number of databases, none entirely comprehensive and information differs between one database and another, with no central authority to settle conflicts

Blockchain allows information stored in distributed ledger rather than in silos. This would mean that information on the blockchain would be updated instantly; the same information would be available to all users rather than stored in separate distinct databases